Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

In connection with my post my post about War, Disease, and Malthusian Leftists, Kathy from Kansas wrote something very interesting (and, when my comments are restored, you can see it for yourself). She said “I noticed a long time ago that most of the little foot-soldiers in groups such as PETA are mentally disturbed: self-hating and humanity-hating. I actually pity most of these unhappy souls.”

Aside from being an excellent statement on its own merits, Kathy’s comment reminded me of something that’s been swirling around in my brain today, and that’s Jane Fonda. You see, in the course of the past two days, I’ve read two things about Jane Fonda. The first is an apocryphal tale about Fonda visiting American POWs and, upon receiving messages from them, turning those messages over to their North Vietnamese captors. While Fonda didn’t do anything quite that bad, her behavior during the Vietnam War was appalling, insofar as she gave aid, comfort and propaganda chops to the enemy:

Jane Fonda in North Vietnam

The second thing I read about Fonda was a Daily Mail story reporting on her utterly appalling parents and the abusive marriages into which she entered. Her mother, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, was a manic-depressive nymphomaniac who eventually committed suicide by slitting her own throat, while her father, famed actor Peter Henry Fonda, was as mean and cold a son of a bitch as you’d ever hope to find. Fonda’s first husband forced her into sexual debauchery and her second husband, rather typically for a hard Leftist, treated her like a slave.

As I read about the horrors — the very real horrors — of Fonda’s young life, what I thought was “And this is the kind of person who takes that anger and despair and trauma and abuse . . . and becomes a Leftist.

I’m in a very visual state of mind today, so I thought I’d dedicate a post to the superb cartoons and posters people send my way. Special thanks go to Caped Crusader, Sadie, Earl, and W “B” S for helping me compile this truly epic illustrated edition.

One of the things that’s frustrating for non-liberals and non-Progressives is Leftists’ refusal to look Islam in the face (so to speak). Yes, there are crazy people who are Christians and there are entire Christian sects that are crazy (such as the Westboro Baptists or Warren Jeffs’ polygamist Mormon cult). The fact remains, however, that Christians as a whole, whether they belong to big churches or small ones, do not embrace or practice terrorism to achieve their political or religious goals.

Muslims, by contrast, routinely practice terrorism to achieve goals that are simultaneously religious and political, owing to Islam’s fusion of God and state. Even though it’s remarkably simple to tie Islam to terrorism (9/11, the underwear bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, the attempted Portland Christmas tree massacre, the Boston Marathon bombing), Leftists scurry around like cockroaches exposed to the light in their desperate attempt to avoid acknowledging Islam’s violent heart.

Today, I read one thing and wrote another, both of which address Leftist hatred for Christianity, even though modern Christianity and genuine Judaism (as opposed to the hard Leftism that masquerades as “reform Judaism”) are the most humane, civilizing forces the world has ever seen. With their focus on justice and grace, they rid the world of slavery, ended child labor, advanced women’s status and, in Israel’s case, fought a 60-year war without sinking to the level of her enemies. But the Left truly hates them and seeks to undermine them at every turn.

The article I read on this subject is Benjamin Wiker’s “Why aren’t liberals more critical of Islam?” In it, he posits that, because secularism arose within and in opposition to a Christian Europe and America, Christianity was its original enemy. Giving proof, however, to my repeated claim that “Progressives” are actually profoundly “regressive,” secularists (i.e., Leftists) continue their battle with Christianity despite that particular war having ended long ago. Judaism and Christianity absorbed the better parts of secularism while holding on to their core religious principles.

Because they are locked forever in an ideological time warp, says Wiker, liberals (or Progressives or Leftists or whatever else they call themselves to avoid the taint their ideas leave behind) cannot contemplate the possibility that there is another enemy, greater than their old foe Christianity. Which brings me to a post I did today for Mr. Conservative. It concerns Michael ‘Mikey’ Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and one of the most rabid anti-Christians you will ever meet.

When I wrote the post this morning, it made me uncomfortable that such a venomous man is somehow Jewish, whether genetically or in actual practice. I hate to see that kind of hatred emanate from a group with which I’m affiliated. However, having read Wiker’s essay, I realize that my concern is unfounded. Weinstein’s hostility to Christians isn’t because he’s Jewish, it’s because he’s a Leftist. (Not all Jews are Leftists, and not all Leftists are Jews, but those Jews who are Leftists are amongst the most extreme Leftists. Mikey’s in that category.)

Here’s my Mr. Conservative post. See what you think:

The Obama government sure knows how to pick ‘em. Right now, the Pentagon is concerned about religious intolerance in the American military. When people who are neither Leftists nor career politicians in thrall to the White House think of intolerance in the military, they think of Major Nidal Malik Hasan who went on an “Allahu Akbar” shooting spree at Fort Hood, killing 13 people and injuring more than thirty. The Pentagon, though, isn’t fooled by these false trails. It knows who the really intolerant people in the military are: Christians.

To that end, the military has brought in Michael Weinstein, Esq., a “religious tolerance” specialist and the man who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (“MRFF”). Michael knows all about tolerance. Or at least, he knows all about tolerance in the Obama era. To Michael (or “Mikey” as he likes to be known), a good way to express tolerance is to call Christians “monsters” or, even better “bloody monsters.”

According to Mikey’s tolerant world view, Christians who serve in the American military are “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.” And that’s just Mikey’s throat-clearing.

Troll through an article Mikey wrote inThe Huffington Post to justify his tolerant attack on alleged Christian intolerance in the American military, and you’ll learn quickly that the people he’s out to destroy (tolerantly, of course) are “evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures.” They are “bandits” who “coagulate their stenchful substances” in religiously-based organizations that support traditional marriage and oppose abortion. Don’t be fooled by these old-fashioned values, though. In fact, says Mikey, “The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry.”

If Mikey is correct, that toxic, hate-filled rhetoric is all one needs to prove that a person or organization constitutes an imminent danger, then Mikey better start looking over his shoulder. Considering the “evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures,” “bandits (who) coagulate their stenchful substances,” and “monsters” who inhabit his rhetorical world, he looks like he’s ready to blow.

What Mikey can’t comprehend is that, while mainstream Christians and conservatives routinely condemn and distance themselves from organizations such as the Westboro Baptist Church, Mikey gets to disseminate his particular brand of hate-filled, toxic intolerance at a major Progressive internet outlet.

Even worse than the applause he’s getting from the mainstream Left is the fact that he’s been taken on by the Pentagon as a consultant to help develop new policies on religious tolerance in the military. These new policies will include rules for court-martialing military chaplains who use the Christian gospel when they counsel the American troops under their care. Or, as MRFF Advisory Board member Larry Wilkerson told The Washington Post, they essentially sexually assaulting the troops with their God talk.

No kidding. Wilkerson says that “Sexual assault and proselytizing are absolutely destructive of the bonds that keep soldiers together.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, Mikey clarified to The Post what Wilkerson really meant:

This is a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs is to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished.

Speaking of committed, though, in a sane world Mikey’s delusions would have him being checked out by psychiatrists as a clear and present danger. In our insane world, psychiatrists are used to disarm our veterans and the delusional, hate-filled, spittle-flecked Mikey gets to work with the Pentagon to create a tolerance policy that ensures that military chaplains will be court martialed for doing their jobs.

If troops are indeed being punished or ostracized because they don’t embrace a particular form of Christianity, the military has to address that. But Mikey makes it clear that, for him, being Christian is the real problem. In that regard, he’s the typical Leftist who says that the First Amendment, rather than giving people the right to worship, means that the Christian religion must be erased from America.

(End of the Mr. Conservative article, beginning of my last comment on the subject.)

As for me, I think that people who are willing to fight and die for their country in a constitutionally-bound military run by civilians, in a nation controlled by the First Amendment, should be allowed to practice their religion without Leftists denying them the comfort of knowing that, as they go into battle, God walks at their side.

Maybe I’m in denial, but I’m feeling less depressed than I felt last night and this morning. Part of my more sanguine attitude is based upon a Taranto principle, which is that Obama now owns the events of the next four years:

Obama has spent the past four years explaining away his failings by essentially arguing he is the best of all possible presidents–that he has done as well as any man could given the “mess” he “inherited” from his predecessor. It is certainly true that he took office under adverse circumstances. But so will whoever takes office Jan. 20. In fact, things are about to get a lot worse because of decisions taken but deferred during the Obama years.

The mess today’s winner will inherit includes not only high unemployment and slow growth but impending policy changes that threaten to make those problems worse. On Jan. 1, unless Congress acts, the Bush tax cuts expire–or, to put it another way, “massive, job-killing tax increases” are about to take effect (that quote is from President Obama). If Obama gets his way–which he likely would if re-elected–Congress will forestall the hike only for taxpayers making under $200,000 or $250,000 a year. That would be good for those fortunate enough to have jobs, but it would not change the tax increase’s job-killing nature, as it would hit investors and small businesses hard.

Then there’s ObamaCare. Although enacted nearly three years ago, it was written so that most of its provisions would not take effect until the next presidential term. “The bottled-up rules to set up President Barack Obama’s health care reform law are going to start flowing quickly right after Election Day,” Politico reports. “As soon as Wednesday, the gears and levers of government bureaucracy are likely to start moving at full speed again.”

The scale of the messes Taranto describes makes it unlikely that Romney could have been a successful president. At best, he might have stemmed an economic or national security collapse, but I doubt he could actually have improved things. The systems for self-destruction — massive debt, vast entitlement expectations, ObamaCare beginning to weave into the warp and woof of our social and economic fabric, a dangerous world outside of America’s borders — are already deeply entrenched. Four years won’t fix them. (Which may be why voters ignored Obama’s empty 2008 promises and decided that he really need 8 years to fulfill the hope and change manifesto.)

But, but . . . what about Reagan? He also inherited a dangerous world and an unhealthy economy. That’s true — but he inherited a different ground game. Political correctness didn’t exist then. Skin color diversity (offset by ideological homogeneity) was at the beginning of its trajectory, not the peak. People still viewed government aid as something one first earned or, if one didn’t earn it, as something one accepted with some degree of embarrassment. Now, even with no pay-in, they view it as a right, with no shame attached. In Reagan’s day, our troops hadn’t been fighting a blood-and-guts war for eight years (as opposed to a massive Cold War chess game) against an enemy that neither the Republican nor the Democrat President willingly named. In Reagan’s day, the intelligentsia may have tried to downplay the Soviet Union, but ordinary people still knew that it was indeed the Evil Empire. Israel was still loved, not hated, so Americans supported a president who supported Israel.

So we have a problem with democracy. It’s not working or, more specifically, has been turned on its end, with the masses manipulated against their own self-interest, creating power elites similar to those described in Milovan Djilas’ The New Class.

How did that happen? I think many of us know there are three pillars of our own destruction: the educational system, the media and entertainment (the popular arts).

Those three areas are so corrupted those who legitimately are on the center-right (or anywhere close to it) will increasingly find themselves swimming upstream against a current so great who knows where it will take them. (Think Hayek, Orwell, etc.) We must address ourselves to these three immediately before it is too late. In many ways, it already is. Culture is the mother of politics and mother is turning into Medea.

Okay, fine. We fight the wars we’re given, not the wars we want. So here’s my thinking.

As I said, I’m less depressed than I was because I think our culture is such that, no matter who occupies the White House, bad things are going to happen. Really bad things, both with our economy and our national security. Seeing as I think the coming hurt is inevitable, I’d rather it happens on a Democrat’s than on a Republican’s watch. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat crow and begin to consider whether my political leanings of the past eight years have been a temporary aberration, and I’ll even contemplate returning to my liberal roots. (Unlikely, but if the next four years are an American boom time, we’ll all need to rethink our belief systems.)

Accepting the inevitable, how do we fight back? As polite conservatives, we’ve always tried to work through the ballot box. We’ve decried the bias in media (including PBS, which we pay for), academia, and education, but we really haven’t done anything about it. We tried to vote for people who would stop funding PBS and we whined on websites about the indoctrination at our children’s schools. We’ve still paid to watch movies and we tune in to TV.

We resent the system, but we work within in. For all that we talk about the ageless wonders of our Constitution and free-market principles generally, we are short-term thinkers, who keep believing (all evidence to the contrary) that we can kill the Progressive tree, not by attacking the roots, but by taking an axe to the tip-top of the tree through honestly brokered elections. The fact is that the cultural battle is so one-sided (against our side) that we’d probably lose even honestly brokered elections, ones that did not involve massive fraud and media malfeasance.

We keep doing trying the same failed tactic, even though we recognize that the strong Democrat victories resulted, not because the Left voted, but because they spent 60 years going after America’s social and intellectual infrastructure. The numbers of actual Lefties are probably pretty small; the number of people who have been taught to vote Democrat without thinking what it really means, is huge.

William F. Buckley figured out the problem in the 1950s and started a cultural counter attack, which ended with the Reagan ascendency. Whew! That was it. We won. Yay. We won forever. NOT. The Left never stopped its ground game. Indeed, during and after the Reagan years (including during the Clinton years), the hard Left consolidated its hold over cultural institutions. We just watched and whined.

We cannot do that anymore. For the next four years, conservatives need to stop worrying about this candidate or that candidate (which is all we ever do) and we need to start wooing the masses.

My friend Lulu, who comments here and who has been an occasional guest poster, called me today with a wonderful idea: Star Parker. Okay, you’re right. Star Parker is a wonderful person, not a wonderful idea, but she’s the symbol for my friend’s idea. We don’t need to run Star Parker for office, we need to run her for talk show host, a la Oprah. She’s engaging, approachable, intelligent, conservative and black. I hate to add the last, because I don’t like to judge people by the color of their skin, but I’m in minority. I live in my head, so I relate to people intellectually. Most don’t. They need other people to look like them in order to start feeling comfortable with their ideas.

The talk show idea, though is the right one. We know that most people aren’t high-level thinkers when it comes to politics but are, instead, low-level, emotional reactors. I do not mean that they are stupid. I just mean that, when it comes to politics, they engage in a non-abstract, non-theoretical, non-intellectual level. The old saying is that, if the mountain won’t come to Mohamed, than Mohamed must go to the mountain. We need to reach out to non-engaged voters by meeting them at their level, rather than insisting that they meet us at ours.

Admittedly, our conservative social infrastructure is limited. Liberals own the media and the entertainment world. But how did they get there? They pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. We need to start pushing too. We need talk shows, even if they start on cable or internet. We also need to take a page out of the Leftist handbook and start using the courts. For example, Lulu suggested that, as taxpayers, we have standing to sue PBS to demand that, as long as public broadcasting gets public monies, it must devote 50% of its programming time to conservative programs. After all, for decades, simply because they rented public airwaves, TV and radio were required to be neutral. Why isn’t PBS?

When it comes to Hollywood, we need to come together an create alternatives. Stop spending your money on movies by people who hate us. Why are we doing that? And we should take the money we didn’t spend on the haters and invest it in movie makers (such as Declaration Entertainment) that will make entertaining movies that don’t hit us over the head with their message, but that feed it to us subliminally. (When we do make movies we always go for the iron hand, rather than the velvet glove). The Left figured this one out, as Ben Shapiro explains in Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. We too can change the paradigm without being obvious.

And why are we, who pay most of the taxes, allowing publicly funded schools to discriminate against conservative teachers? We sit back and cheer when an individual conservative teacher sues after being denied tenure, but we’ve never had a taxpayer suit saying that, just as student body’s have to be diverse, so should faculty — and that this diversity includes not discriminating against belief systems. In other words, we have to redefine diversity so that it encompasses ideology as well as (or instead of) skin color.

We also have to advertise ourselves better. As Romney’s campaign (and McCain’s and Bush’s too) showed, Republican political “leaders” find our ideology embarrassing and seek to wrap it up in gauzy, often impenetrable, platitudes. One of my readers, Fern, suggests that our campaigns have a musty, fuzzy look. The Left identifies us as backwards, reactionary, etc., and we yield. We’ve certainly given the Left linguistic control. They’re “Progressive” and “Forward.” We’re fuddy-duddy “conservatives.”

Obama, a child of the Left, understands that words matter, more than the fact that these so-called Progressives keep trying to recycle ideas that failed in all nations that have tried them. They’ve got the glamor and the gloss, and those gimmicks sell in a superficial world.

One of the first and easiest things we can do is to start with re-branding. Keep in mind that calling conservatives “right wing” harks back to the 18th century French parliament, when the non-revolutionaries sat on the right side of the hall. Is that how we want to identify ourselves — as relics of the ancien regime? “Conservative” too makes us sound like a bunch of reactionary codgers who can be painted as desirous of slavery (never mind that the Republicans freed the slaves), Jim Crow-lovers (never mind that Republicans opposed Jim Crow), and misogynists (never mind that Republicans are in the vanguard of fighting Muslims and Chinese Communists who treat women and girl babies like disposable property).

It turns out that, in a media rich world, Shakespeare was wrong. That which we call rose, by any other name does not smell as sweet. With that in mind, how about starting to call ourselves “Individualists” or “the Freedom Party” or something like that? Liberals successfully (and mostly under the radar) rebranded themselves as Progressives, leaving behind the musty Victorian taint of “liberalism.” If they can do it, why can’t we?

Truly, the wake-up call we received yesterday is not about 2012 or even about 2016. It is about our finally understanding that the opposition has long had a better strategy and endless institutional patience. We won only when there were still enough voters who hadn’t been indoctrinated. In 2008, there weren’t enough of us remaining to tilt the scales. The Left attacked America at the root, and we need to take it back at precisely the same level.

The battle is over. The war has begun. Consider this post Ground Zero. If you have ideas — practical, non-whining ideas that ordinary people can put into effect — post them in the comments section, and we’ll see how far we can disseminate them. For starters, I am no longer a conservative. I am an “individualist” who supports a “Freedom Party,” as opposed to a “statist” who supports “Big Government.”

I left a trail of hostile professors in my wake when I graduated from UC Berkeley. I didn’t do that intentionally. I never set out to be obnoxious or disruptive. Back in the day, I marched in ideological lock-step with my professors. (Although even then I couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy of the Berkeley professors prating on about class warfare while making under-the-table payments to Mexican women to clean their houses and Japanese men to groom their gardens.)

The problem I had at Berkeley is that then, as now, I have a great reverence for the English language and, more than that, I’m a complete nincompoop when it comes to learning other languages. This means that I never mastered Marxist cant, which is as foreign a language to the good English speaker as are Chinese and French.

My inability to comprehend Marxism at a linguistic level meant that, when my history professor made some statement about “the alienation of the medieval peasant as resulting from the hegemony of the feudal infrastructure that dominated the commodification for the agricultural economy despite the destructive rise of the proto-petite bourgeoisie,” I didn’t nod sagely and scribble frantic notes as did the rest of my classmates. Instead, assuming that my class had some number fewer than 1,000 students, I raised my hand and said, “Excuse me, Professor Whatsit. I don’t understand. Can you please explain?”

This seemingly innocent question would result in another shower of Marxist gibble-gabble. At which point I, supremely confident in my mastery of the English language and therefore unfazed by my inability to understand, would repeat, “I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.” Eventually, parrot-like, I was able to repeat this nonsense with sufficient facility to garner a magna cum laude degree, but I never did internalize all this babble. And, as I said, many professors weren’t very fond of me.

In retrospect, I suspect that the professors looked askance at me because I played the role of the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” effectively pointing out that what they were saying had no meaning — at least with regard to the feudal, agrarian culture that existed in medieval Europe. Likewise, there was simply no Marxist way to make sense of Jane Austen. I must say, though, that my suitably Marxist English literature professor managed to do what many might have thought was impossible: he made Jane Austen dull.

I’m politically more astute now, but have just as little patience for Leftist gibble-gabble. That’s why, despite attempts to read Shari Motro’s NYT’s Op-Ed about “Preglimony,” I still can’t make sense of what she’s saying. Motro seems to argue that men will be less likely to get women pregnant if they had to pay for her . . . what? . . . pain and suffering or clothes or something during pregnancy. Heck, they might even be forced to help to pay the cost of killing their baby (emphasis mine). At least, I think that’s what Ms. Motro . . . or, should I say, Professor Motro, because this incoherent ideologue is a professor of law at the University of Richmond in Virginia. See what you make of this:

Since the 1970s it has been possible to genetically link a father and his baby with increasing levels of accuracy. Then, a test using amniotic fluid let us test a baby’s DNA before birth, but the procedure increased the risk of miscarriage. Now a prenatal blood test has made the process far easier. Since a small amount of fetal DNA is present in a pregnant woman’s blood, the pregnancy can be genetically linked to her partner through a simple blood draw from the woman’s arm.

One of the potential ramifications is that men might be called upon to help support their pregnant lovers before birth, even if the pregnancy is ultimately terminated or ends in miscarriage. They might be asked to chip in for medical bills, birthing classes and maternity clothes, to help to cover the loss of income that often comes with pregnancy, or to contribute to the cost of an abortion.

Frankly, I don’t see why pregnancy support would be any more of a deterrent than child-support. Having drifted away from her shopping list (clothes, medical bills, killing baby), Prof. Motro gets abstract, and I do mean abstract:

Rather than focusing on the relationship between the man and a hypothetical child, the new technology invites us to change the way we think about the relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. Both partners had a role in the conception; it’s only fair that they should both take responsibility for its economic consequences.

Former spouses are often required to pay alimony; former cohabiting partners may have to pay palimony; why not ask men who conceive with a woman to whom they are not married to pay “preglimony”? Alternatively, we might simply encourage preglimony through the tax code, by allowing pregnancy-support payments to be deductible (which is how alimony is treated).

Huh? An entire high-exposure op-ed to say that men who can’t be counted on for child support might pay for maternity clothes?

Despite having encouraged men to pay to abort their DNA (apparently yet another way to encourage them not to get women pregnant in the first place), Prof. Motro feels compelled to assure New York Times readers that her whole “preglimony” idea isn’t just a backdoor argument against abortion. After all, some might say that, if you’re arguing that both biological parents’ obligation to the fetus begins in utero — or, at least, that the obligation to make sure Mama is stylishly attired begins in utero — maybe you’re also arguing that the fetus has legal rights, including the right not to be aborted. Not so. In a paragraph that I still haven’t completely deciphered, Motro assures pregnant women that, even though men have an obligation to the fetus that bears their DNA, abortion is unlimited. Or at least that’s what I think she’s saying:

The most frequent objection I hear to this idea is that it will give men a say over abortion. A woman’s right to choose is sometimes eclipsed by an abusive partner who pressures her into terminating or continuing a pregnancy against her will, and preglimony could exacerbate this dynamic. But the existence of bullies shouldn’t dictate the rules that govern all of society. In the name of protecting the most vulnerable, it sets the bar too low for the mainstream, casting lovers as strangers and pregnancy as only a woman’s problem.

It’s also possible that preglimony could deter a different form of abuse by making men who pressure their partners into unprotected sex, on the assumption that the woman will terminate an unwanted pregnancy, financially liable for the potential result.

To which I again ask huh? Feel free to translate. I don’t know what she’s saying, except that Motro thinks a right to choose eclipses all other legal and moral rights.

This isn’t Motro’s only foray into incomprehensibility. Back in 2008, right before the election, Motro wrote a masterfully incoherent love letter to Obama’s promise as a healer. In it, Motro dissed her native Israel for being a hate-filled, racist land, rhapsodized the American South for its love-level, and vomited up the usual charges against Bush. Keep in mind as you read these excerpts that this woman is a product of higher education and that she teaches the next generation of leaders:

I grew up in Israel, and during my last visit there I felt the interconnectedness of the violence of that place in a way I never had before. I felt the hatred and the heartbreak and the hopelessness seeping like sap from everywhere, from the ambient near-fistfight atmosphere in every interaction. I felt it in the venom with which a minibus driver shouted at a migrant worker who didn’t want to pay for her five year old son “Go back to Africa,” and from the look on the boy’s face as he watched their shouting match quietly, resignedly, understanding that this is the world, a battle. I felt the poison walking on the beach in Tel Aviv – beautiful, sunny, blue skied Tel Aviv – because I knew that my mere presence there is so offensive to some people they want to kill me, want to kill themselves in order to kill me. And it hit me in Jerusalem, walking through bucolic, placid streets where Jews live in Arab houses, houses in which people who are still alive have memories.

[snip]

Flying back from Tel Aviv to Richmond was, as always, soothing. Richmond, where you get to a four-way stop sign and everybody stops. And marching through campus with students and faculty on MLK day, I thought: these American feel-good gestures, which the Israeli in me rolls her eyes at, there’s something to them. These Americans, and the Richmonders I’ve met in particular, they get something right. With good will and gentleness, they are working hard, imperfectly, but working hard nevertheless at healing this bloody, bloody history which here in Richmond is so recent.

And what a gift it would be if we had a president who would stoke this flame.

The woman is a walking-talking and, sadly, teaching, spouter of Leftist platitudes and hypocrisy, untethered to either fact or logic. No wonder our children aren’t learning. With teachers such as Ms. Motro, they don’t have a fighting chance.

A gazillion of my liberal facebook friends have posted this little bit of wit and wisdom:

After seeing this post once too often, I cracked. The last person amongst my friends who posted it got a message from me asking precisely how compelling an argument can be when it compares a human moral code to unreasoning animal behavior. Even if one thinks the human moral position is wrong, it still makes no sense to compare a human’s view homosexuality, a view based on reason, faith, logic, hate, or whatever, to a cow’s or penguin’s approach, which is purely unreasoning and instinctive. It’s a cute aphorism, but a lousy argument.

Clever aphorisms that are actually lousy arguments are the Left’s stock in trade. One of the oldies but goodies is “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Hah! Hah! Hah! Men are useless! Except for pesky little things like making babies possible and, under ordinary, non government welfare circumstances, providing both the woman and their child with love, shelter, food, and stability.

Another cute, meaningless Leftism is “War is not the answer.” Whenever I see that stupid bumper sticker, I always mumble to myself, “It depends what the question is.” War is not the answer if your neighbor asks to borrow a cup of sugar. War is a useful answer if a hostile power uses high impact explosives to kill thousands of your citizens — and threatens to repeat the performance until you are entirely subjugated.

Oh, and about this one?

Isn’t that a great idea? Who cares that the Islamic religion does not acknowledge the possibility of coexistence? Islam isn’t shy about touting the fact that it is predicated on absolute conquest and subjugation. So the coexistence is kind of Orwellian (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal that others”), or Tacitus-ian (“They make a desert and call it peace”).

This long harumph is my way of introducing a couple of posts that Zombie wrote, each of which tracks Leftist protests, all of which come complete with signs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to review the images Zombie shares, and to spot the Leftist sales pitches in all their glory. They are, without exception, illogical strident, obscene, or selfish (or some combination of the four).

The Washington Free Beacon is a new online paper with an interesting premise: unlike MSM papers, which treat liberalism as the norm, and conservativism as a headline grabbing abnormality, this publication gives the big scare headlines to the Left. In other words, it’s not just that it reports the stories, but that it reports them so as to highlight Progressive malfeasance.

Oratory died with Leftism, which hides, rather than reveals, truth; and with MTV, which brought America’s attention span down to 15 seconds. This is the sad result. No wonder Newt is popular right now. Whether he’s a snake oil salesman or the real deal, and regardless of staggering baggage, he might just go down as the last real public speaker, someone who can hit core truths and do so extemporaneously.

I know that most if not all of us in the Bookworm circle have seen this horrific video below. I post it because we need to see this again and again. We need to look into their eyes to recognize what this is. I view this with fascination, much as I would were I an anthropologist viewing South Pacific cannibals at the village feast…with morbid horror at the depths of human depravity:

I have never, never experienced such hatred and vileness emanating from any group of conservatives that I know. Not even close. When I have observed rank racism, misogyny or homophobia, it has almost always emanated from people of the Left. It’s as if by incanting a few pat phrases of Liberal/Left orthodoxy or voting for a half-black man (speaking of race, not culture) as President, they feel they get a pass at spewing such vileness (as in, “I can’t be racist, I just voted for Obama”).

I like to use my own Leftwing /Liberal brothers-in-law as my own anthropological laboratory. A couple are happy cheerful people who don’t have a mean bone in their bodies. OK, they are clueless, but that is another story. There is one, however, who projects a portly, kindly exterior that absolutely seeths with venom underneath (his Facebook postings make my skin crawl).

Perhaps one clue is that he is also a man very much disappointed with his choices in life. I also don’t know if he is able to see himself as others see him. Similarly, we have the wife of a close family friend…outwardly, she is a very kind and considerate person. She talks the talk, anyway. But if you get her on the subject of George Bush or Sarah Palin, she transforms into a writhing, spitting demon (to her credit, she is at least aware of this and admits it as a character flaw).

Frankly, these people scare me. I feel that, should they ever be given the power to act out what they verbalize, they would unleash great evil on humanity.

What’s going on with such people? What goes on in their hearts and minds?

Does any budding psychiatrist within our discussion group have insights to share?

One of the things that I try to understand is the Great Divide between today’s Liberals and conservatives that has left us talking past one another on policy issues. Frankly, I have concluded that discussion with Liberals is often futile because we attribute different meanings to words and concepts.

One of those concepts, I suspect, has to do with “money”. Let me throw the following proposition on the table for discussion:

Liberal /Lefties view “money” as a fixed, tangible quantity with intrinsic value, like gold coins, for example. Thus, the value of money is intrinsic to the lucre itself, be it coins or dollar notes. Conservatives, on the other hand, see “money” more abstractly as representing “created value”…as scrip or IOU on value created or received. As economists put it, money is a “medium of exchange” for value. So, for liberals, “money” is something tangible to that must be amassed by taking from someone else’s stash. For conservatives, “money” is something more abstract that must to be created (i.e. goods or services) directly (e.g., wages) or indirectly (e.g., inheritance) through the creation of “value”.

How might this color our perceptions of one another?

1) When people like Bill Gates amass a large quantity of money by creating products that many people wish to purchase, conservatives view Gates’ money as a reflection of the value that he created and contributed others. No hard feelings there – it’s a fair exchange. A Liberal/Lefty, however, sees only Gate’s amassed pot of lucre that appears disproportionately high compared to the lucre stored in other peoples’ pots. They see this imbalance as patently unfair, especially since this lucre was transferred from other peoples’ modest stashes into Bill Gates’ already whopping big stash: Bill has more, all of his customers have less.

2) When money is needed to achieve a desirable social or governmental goal, a conservative recognizes that such money needs to be generated somewhere to pay for this goal. This can only be done by either drawing down existing value (confiscating peoples’ lucre) or by creating new ‘value” that can be taxed (i.e., growing the economy). A Liberal/Lefty doesn’t make this connection – they see the process simply as one of either redistributing the existing lucre from other peoples’ pots or creating new lucre by printing more money. The problem of printing new lucre, of course, is that it is still underwritten by a fixed quantity of value – expanding money supply representing a fixed value means that each dollar is worth less. We call that inflation.

I can’t tell you how many times Liberals have looked at me with puzzlement when I have asked where they expect to get the money for their favored social programs.

3) De-linking “money” from the process of wealth creation makes it easy for Liberal/Lefties to confuse using tax money to pay for unemployment checks, dance troupes or road repair as “economic stimulus”. You are, after all, taking lucre sitting idle in some peoples’ pots and putting that lucre into other peoples’ pockets to spend on purchases. Unfortunately, the fact is that such activities do not in themselves create new value. This cannot therefore “grow” the economy.

What do you think? Am I onto something? And, if so, what other aspects of the Great Divide does this help to explain? Does this help or hinder us in discussing our differences with the Liberal /Left?

I’m reading a very enjoyable novel right now that is completely tuned in to the way in which the Left operates, especially when it comes to the media and academia.

The writer is completely tuned into the name calling that substitutes for informed debate. For example, when the book’s protagonist, Paul, learns that Leftists starting submitted articles to a magazine that contained misstatements of facts in an effort to shift political sentiment (a la Climategate, although this book predates that effort), the following dialog ensues between Paul and Bill Weider, the magazine’s editor:

“But – Bill, why don’t you publish the story you told me? Just as you’ve told it to me? Let your readers know. Let the public see what is happening.”

Weidler’s frown came back. “You know what will happen? There will be a campaign against us. We’ll be called fascists, war-mongers, American imperialists, witch-hunters.”

“You’ve forgotten to add ‘hysteria-inciters,’” Paul said, smiling. “Strange how often they’ve been using hysteria recently – almost hysterically, in fact.”

On the subject of claims about hysteria, my sister, much impressed, sent me this Glenn Greenwald article deriding American hysteria about the Flaming Panties bomber. I wrote her back that Americans would be less inclined to be hysterical if the Administration would identify and focus upon an enemy – that would be radical Islam, by the way. As long as the Administration (and this goes for the past Administration too) refuses to identify the enemy, all Americans are suspect, and all must be exposed to searches, stupid restrictions, and other limitations on civil liberties.

In a charming aside, the book tackles the root cause question. When the book’s heroine, Rona, and her sister, Peggy, talk about an unpleasant acquaintance, they have this to say:

“She isn’t a friend of yours, is she?” Peggy was now very much the elder sister.

“Not particularly,” Rona said, which was a miracle of understatement. “Scott says she’s a product of her environment,” she added.

“Strange how we never use that phrase when we are describing pleasant people,” Peggy said….

Do I need to remind you that one of the first things Obama did after the Flaming Panties bombing was to emphasize the poverty in Yemen? Yes, it’s true that poor, corrupt countries are great hosts for radical Islamists, but there is no doubt but that the bombers, whether they’re the fabulously wealthy founder of Al Qaeda, young dilettantes flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, ordinary Yorkshire youths blowing up British subways, educated psychiatrists shooting soldiers at Fort Hood, or fabulously wealthy Nigerians setting their underwear on fire are products of only one environment, one that the Left never dares to acknowledge: Islam.

Using a conversation between Paul and his friend, Jon, a professor, the writer has a long riff on the way in which the Left deliberately targets universities and newspapers – indeed, all media of mass communication – as a way in which to manipulate the public:

“You’re in education, Jon. Do you think propaganda is a powerful force? Could it be dangerous? Supposing an enemy of this country had its sympathizers carefully planted here? Supposing these propagandists were trying to infiltrate such businesses and professions as radio, the press, films, schools and colleges, the theater, publishing?”

“That’s a damned silly question,” Jon said almost angrily. “You ask how dangerous it might be?” He looked at Paul, unbelievingly, but Paul kept silent. “This is the twentieth century, with communication easier and more powerful than it’s ever been. The trouble with those who see no danger, who think we are perfectly safe if only we invent more hideous bombs is that they are still living with a nineteenth century idea of peace. Wars haven’t changed much except in bigger and better holocausts. But peace, as we are going to see it in this century, is something quite altered. A lot of new dangers are going to stay with us permanently just because we’ve invented a lot of peacetime conveniences that make life so interesting. It isn’t only armies we have to fear today: it’s words, words abused and corrupted and twisted.”

Still Paul said nothing.

“You see,” Jon went on patiently, “a hundred years ago, fewer people could read, fewer people were educated, and fewer people thought they could argue about international conditions. Also, in those days, propaganda spread more slowly and less widely. But now we’ve got a vast public who read their papers, discuss books and articles, go to the movies and the theater, listen to their radio, watch television, and send their children to schools and colleges.”

“And a public,” Paul interposed, “who have enough to do with arranging their own lives without analyzing all the things they read or hear. They’ve got to trust the honesty of those men who deal with the written or spoken word. Just as the journalist, or the movie director, or the teacher, has got to trust the honesty of the businessmen and workers whenever he buys a refrigerator or a car or a shirt. Isn’t that right?”

The above was written before the 2008 election – before the media completely abandoned its role of reporting and became an institution devoted to advocating a single party in an election. And, as Paul predicted, the public bought it hook, line and sinker, trusting as they did in the honesty of the written and spoken word pouring out over the airwaves. Nowadays, big lies get promulgated with warp speed, in myriad media, and they live forever, corrupting political discourse.

The author recognizes the way in which the Left is hostile to any wars that might conceivably advance American interests. In speaking of a college campus, she says:

“The colleges and universities were full of pickets with placards saying it was all an imperialist war. The students and faculties were deluged with leaflets denouncing war-mongers and reactionaries. Speakers were appearing on the campus, haranguing us all not to fight.”

There’s a universality to that description, since it aptly describes the Left’s anti-War tactics in 1940, 1968, 1991, 2003, and today. To the Left, the possibility of a good war, a war to maintain the line against totalitarianism and preserve freedom, is always impossible to imagine – and the easiest targets for that failure of imagination are colleges students, since it is they who must be convinced that they are fighting for something worth defending.

Speaking of fighting for something worth defending, the writer has no truck with the Leftist habit of moral relativism. Here are Rona and her boyfriend Scott having a debate about a guest at a party who Rona believes has a tiresome habit of painting everything in Left of center politics:

“His line is so old! Two years ago, or three, he could manage to get away with it. But not now.”

“What do you mean?” Scott looked across the room.

“Just that he wasn’t the least little bit the original talker he likes to imagine he is. He only succeeded in annoying most of our guests.”

“Because he thinks differently from them? Se we must all talk the same way, think the same things?”

“No, darling!” She rose and came over to him. “I don’t believe two of us in the room echoed any point of view, except in a general way – well, of believing that right is right and wrong is wrong.”

“That’s all relative,” Scott said. “Depends on each man’s frame of reference.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said, “except for the small things in life. You can find them as relative as you like. But in the big things, you’ve got to decide what is right, what is wrong. Or else you’ve no moral judgment, at all. Like Murray. He’s just a parrot, that’s all he is.”

Moral relativism, of course, is a chronic talking point for the Left, and a chronic problem for those educated and controlled by the Left. In the War against Islamists, for example, moral relativism is tightly entwined with the whole “root cause” that both the author and I mentioned above. After all, as Michael Moore said, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. The Left never seems to understand that, while the act of fighting may be the same, the reason one fights determines whether one is morally right or wrong. Fighting for individual liberty is a good reason to fight; fighting to subjugate the world to a misogynist, homophobic, antisemitic, anti-Christian, completely totalitarian religion – well, not so good.

In the last section of the book from which I’ll quote, the writer also tackles the Left’s habit of targeting individuals by appealing to their sense of victim hood. Multiculturalism isn’t a means of preserving what’s special about a group’s ethnicity. Instead, it’s a political tool aimed at dividing Americans from each other, and making them dependent on the Left as their only savior.

While today’s victims are mostly blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, women (when it’s still useful), Muslims, etc., in the book, the man targeted to be a victim who can be saved only by the Left is a Jew:

“I’ve a battle on my hands right now. They want us to keep different, and I’m telling them the hell with that, we’re Americans. That’s what we are. Stop building a wall around us, stop emphasizing differences, that’s what I keep trying to tell them. And they look at me as if I were some kind of traitor.” He looked at Jon Tyson. “But I’m building no wall, and no one is going to persuade me to do it.”

Obviously, I’ve been playing coy with you, keeping secret the book’s author, title and date of publication. Those of you who know my weakness for Helen MacInnes’ Cold War novels might already have figured out that I’m quoting from one of her books. The book in question is Neither Five Nor Three, published in 1951. It focuses on the Left’s infiltration of the media world and college campuses.

This was the beginning of the Cold War, of course, so Helen MacInnes couldn’t look ahead and realize how that infiltration would be completely successful. While we were challenging the Soviet Union abroad, it was taking over our institutions at home. And now, as Leftist Professor Ward Churchill would say, “The chickens have come home to roost.” All of the nascent tactics MacInnes described then – the moral relativism, the victim-based multiculturalism, the name-calling, the anti-Americanism – have become permanently entrenched in America’s media and education cultures. In those days, people saw these things and remarked upon them. In these days, people believe in the message and approve of the messengers.

I’ve been saying for some years that the biggest mistake the Islamists made was impatience. Demographically, between their fecundity and the sterility of Western culture, Muslims were headed towards societal tipping points all over Europe within a couple of decades. Had they set tight, they could have completed what they started in the Middle Ages and finally lost at the Gates of Vienna: the Islamist takeover of Europe.

But they couldn’t wait. They took down the Twin Towers, bombed trains and subways, blew up school children, exploded night clubs, killed Van Goghs, harassed women, and engaged in myriad other acts that made Westerners aware of their presence as something more than just enshrouded women and cheap labor. It’s still unclear whether the West has the will to fight, but the West certainly got timely notice to have the ability to fight. While the Islamists are certainly spoiling for the fight and, indeed, glory in the bloodshed, there’s no doubt that war brings the risk of loss and — as I said — the Islamists could have avoided this risk altogether if they had just waited until critical mass, when the West would have lost before the fight began.

For the last few months, I’ve going around saying exactly the same thing about the American Left, which took its victory, a victory that spread across many states but that never really exceeded more than a few percentage points in any given area, and decided that it had a sweeping mandate. And what a mandate: destroy the economy, socialize medicine, and make American supine before all of the world’s worst actors. Dennis Prager has had the same thought, and wrote a really great article on the subject:

There may be a major silver lining for conservatives and for America’s future thanks to the foreign and domestic policies of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate: For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left.

It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.

[snip]

1. The left wants America to abandon its defining commitment to individualism and replace it with a European-style nanny, or welfare, state. At most Americans’ core is an abiding belief that we are supposed to take care of ourselves, our families and our neighbors, and not rely on the state to do so.

2. The left is naive about evil. Most Americans deemed Communism evil; the left ridiculed President Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and often undermined the fight against the Communist world. So, too, the left is naive about Islamic terror and undermines the fight against it.

The smoking gun was the nearly universal denial by the left that his Islamic beliefs had anything to do with Maj. Nidal Hasan’s mass murder of fellow servicemen at Fort Hood. One of many examples was this reaction to the shootings by Evan Thomas, Editor at Large at Newsweek: “I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label (Muslim) attached to him, it will get the right wing going…”

3. The left is more interested in redistributing wealth than in creating it. This should have been as obvious to Americans as the brightness of the sun. Finally, Americans are coming to realize that the left’s goal is now, as it always has been, equality, not prosperity.

4. The left is far more interested in power than the right is. This, too, should have been self-evident, but finally, people are realizing that those who are preoccupied with creating an ever-expanding state are obviously far more interested in amassing power than those who want a smaller state.

5. The left is preoccupied with America being loved, and in pursuit of that end, compromises some of America’s core values. Examples abound here, too. To cite a few: the Obama administration’s neglect of those in Iran risking their lives for freedom in that tyranny; the administration’s refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan leader visited Washington, lest the president annoy China’s dictators; the American government siding with Hugo Chavez against the Honduran government, which had legally removed a Chavez clone from the Honduran presidency; and the president’s obsequious apologies for America wherever he goes.

Dennis Prager gives global examples of the ideology powering the Left. Phyllis Schlafly gives particular examples of those people closest to the president. And a scarier bunch of rogues and ideologues you’ve never seen. So far, the media has been working overtime to keep ordinary Americans from learning too much about these pillars of academe, now all0wed to put their theories into effect in the real world, but word is leaking out. And in keeping with Prager’s theory about knowledge giving the American people power, the Left’s inability to keep its worst actors and ideas off the national stage may prove to be America’s greatest strength.